Success Story: Cerealicious

There’s a new food craze in town, and if you haven’t heard of it yet, you’re either out of touch or you’re getting too old. That’s because since 2006, many young kids, from grade school to college, have been saving up their baon for bowls of cereal they can buy in school. And a lot of yuppies troop to the nearest outlet for their cereal fix too.
So what’s with the bowl of cereal, you ask. At Cerealicious, a cereal bowl is not just a cereal bowl. True, cereals are drowned in milk here, but the toppings go from fruits to chocolates to puddings to coffee jelly and more. In fact, Cerealicious offers 40 cereals and 40 toppings and you can mix them any way you want to or go for any of the 20 certified “blockbuster” mixes cheerily named after blockbuster movies. Thus, you can munch on Charlie and the Chocnut Factory today, order Nutting Hill tomorrow, and snack on Oreo Afraid of the Dark the day after.
Nothing like it has been offered yet in the country, although cereal bars and cereal cafes have been mushrooming in the US lately. This is the reason why a group of young people—friends, classmates and officemates all aged 24 then—banded together in 2005 to offer that concept here.

Read more here.
Key learnings from Cerealicious:
1. Offer something new and unique
2. Educate the market
3. If at first you don’t succeed…
4. Consider franchising after more than a year of successful operation
5. Don’t poo-pooh the creation of an operations manual
6. Think carefully how to improve the backend system
7. Stay on top of marketing gimmicks
Hope these give you a little bit of encouragement! Good luck on your businesses. (Photos by Shaira Luna, courtesy of SME Insight.)